The dividends, like today’s record, continue to trickle in

When I started my march toward a $1,000,000 portfolio, I decided pretty early on I wanted to get there with a steady stream of dividends … and when I say steady, I mean at least 50 payments a month.

I’m not quite there yet – still haven’t hit 50 in any month, let alone all of them – but I’m getting closer all the time.

This month, for example, I’m at 41 – a number boosted by the three I earned today. The dividends added up to a combined $10.64 in cash I plan to use to buy more dividend-paying stocks at the end of the month. The dividends have added up to $37.11 so far this month and $271.12 so far this year.

The $10.64, if you couldn’t tell from the title of this post, is a brand new single-day record for me. My previous best, $8.69, came back in May. It was a gigantic number for me at the time and was aided in large part by a $7/share special dividend from Costco.

Today’s dividends: $10.64 (new record)

New Residential Investment Corp: NRZ is the reason for the record. It accounted for all but $0.64 of today’s dividends all by itself, passing along $10 ($0.50/share) for the 20 shares I own.

I like NRZ for a lot of different reasons. I picked up most of my position after selling off another … an addition-by-subtraction transaction you can read about here.

Its $2 annualized dividend represents an 11.72% yield – a mark that dwarfs pretty much all of the other 130-plus companies in my Dividend Farm. It’s not necessarily a good dividend-growth stock – raises aren’t exactly its forte – but it’s a tremendous income-generating stock. The company has a profit margin of 45.92% and EPS growth of 246.67% (last quarter verses the same quarter from 2016). It’s also cheap, at least according to its P/E ratio of 6.09. If you’re looking to boost your dividend income, you don’t have to look much farther than NRZ.

Foot Locker: FL paid me a $0.31 dividend for the one share I own. FL has taken an absurdly abrupt turn for the worse over the course of the last year, down more than 50%.

I bought my share for $76.77 back in May. Today, it’s trading around $32 a share (a number that literally hurts me to type).

The hit hurts, for sure, but the pain is soothed a bit by the fact I only own one share. That’s one of the beautiful things about owning so many companies without any single one making up more than 5% of my portfolio – a free fall like the one FL is going through doesn’t totally derail things.

If there is another silver lining to the slide it’s this: the dividend yield jumped from somewhere in the 2% range to up near 4%. I, and don’t laugh, am actually thinking about picking up some shares. Seriously, stop laughing. Even one share would lower my cost basis by more than $20. FL doesn’t have hardly any debt, its P/E ratio is under 8 and EPS, while down significantly, is still $4.33 on an annual basis.

It also has a low dividend payout ratio (28.64%).

Sysco: SYY passed along a $0.33 dividend for the one share I own. It was my third payment from the company. SYY hasn’t done much since I added it to my portfolio, but it has been consistent. With 40 years of dividend growth to hang its hat on, it looks like that’s the plan.